ZURB is a well-known interaction design firm with big name clients and an amazing suite of apps that make the design process so much easier. We’ve written about ZURB’s Playground, which is like a candy store for designers. We covered Bounce, an interactive screenshot where you can highlight areas and leave notes. We’ve written about Clue, Verify, Strike, Notable, Reel, Spur and Axe. As you can see, this team is a god damned powerhouse, and we love them for it.
The company’s newest app, Solidify (currently in private release), is the fourth app from ZURB’s product design suite and it makes it outrageously easy to create code-less design prototypes. Today, you can sign up for early testing via this link.
With only screenshots, Solidify lets you link together images to construct an interface for testing early in the product development life-cycle. This way, you can see how your design will actually work before lots of time and effort has gone into implementing it.
But aside from how easy it is to create the prototypes, Solidify also gathers feedback and analytics during user testing, saving tons of time by quickly bringing together priceless data. According to ZURB’s Marketing Lead Dmitry Dragilev, “there are tools that exist out there to create prototypes from static screens, [but] there’s nothing out there to help you gather analytics on prototypes about clicks, how long it took people to accomplish a task on your prototype, what their clickflow was [, etc.]”
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
More from ZURB:
Ask any designer and they’ll tell you that creating a clickable prototype is a royal pain in the ass. Coding a prototype in static code requires a pretty good amount of effort and hacking it in Keynote is also filled with gotchas and pitfalls. If you want to create a prototype early in the product development lifecycle, you need an easy way to create a clickable prototype from nothing more than a few images.
Once you have your prototype, you run into the problem of getting feedback on it. User tests are awesome, but very time consuming. Sometimes you have a question on a focused feature or a click flow. You just want to know if it works or not. This is where quantitative data is useful. By collecting data on prototypes, you can send them to a larger audience and quickly see the overall trends.
This announcement comes at the heels of the ZURBapps suite launch, which gathers together all of the company’s paid and free apps into one location. We’re clearly big fans of it here at TNW, but only because ZURB consistently follows through with excellent design and useful tools for the Web development community. Check out the apps below, and feel free to let us know what you think in the comments!
➤ Solidify (free for testing, likely $19/month on release) & the ZURBapps suite
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.